In contrast with its predecessor, Dazzle Ships met with a degree of critical and commercial hostility, but has gone on to be retrospectively hailed by critics as a "masterpiece" and a "lost classic" within popular music. The record has also been championed, and cited as an influence, by several modern artists.[4]

Contents

Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, 1919, the ultimate source of the album's name.

Frontman Andy McCluskey recalled: "We wanted to be ABBA and Stockhausen. The machinery, bones and humanity were juxtaposed."[5] However, the album did also contain six conventional pop songs, both up-tempo numbers and ballads. Two of them, "The Romance of the Telescope" and "Of All the Things We've Made" were remixed versions of songs previously issued on B-sides to earlier singles (on the "Joan of Arc" single, "The Romance of the Telescope" was specifically described as "unfinished"). "Radio Waves" was a new version of a song from Humphreys and McCluskey's pre-OMD band, The Id. Two singles were released from the album, "Genetic Engineering" and "Telegraph", which achieved moderate chart success in the United Kingdom and on American rock and college radio. Both were also released as 7" vinyl picture discs.

The band's former record company, the independent Dindisc label, had recently ceased trading, and so the band's contract was transferred to DinDisc's parent company, Virgin Records. However, to maintain the image of being signed to an "indie" label, the record sleeve purported that the album was released by the fictitious "Telegraph" label. The album was released on LP, compact cassette and compact disc.

The "Radio Prague" track is the actual interval signal of the Czechoslovak Radio foreign service, including the time signal and station ID spoken in Czech. "Time Zones" is a montage of various speaking clocks from around the world. Neither "Radio Prague" nor "Time Zones" carry any writing credit at all, with OMD being credited only for arranging the tracks. The "This Is Helena", "ABC Auto-Industry" and "International" tracks also include parts of some broadcasts recorded off-air (a presenter introducing herself, economic bulletin and news, respectively).[6] The track "Genetic Engineering" is an overt homage to Kraftwerk, with the vocal arrangement drawing heavily on the structure employed on their track "Computer World".

"Genetic Engineering" was covered by indie rock band Eggs and released as a single in 1994.

Upon release, the experimental Dazzle Ships alienated many critics. John Shearlaw in Record Mirror cautioned: "To describe the LP as difficult and fractured is an understatement."[15] In his review for the Leader-Post, Michael Lawson wrote: "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark strains so hard to be topical on their fourth album, Dazzle Ships, that they ultimately find themselves mired in obliqueness...too much attention [is] given to soundtrack-like effects that only clutter what decent electropop baubles there are here – and there is indeed some good, if limited, work."[10] John Gill in Time Out slammed Dazzle Ships as "redundant avant-garde trickery".[15]

Bob Stanley in The Guardian wrote: "[The album] contained no obvious hits and soundtracked the cold war at its coldest. No one bought it, mind you, so Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Dazzle Ships came to be viewed as a heroic failure – the ultimate commercial suicide...[it] entered the charts at No 5, then dropped like a stone."[5]

Critical opinion of Dazzle Ships has since shifted to a more favourable stance, with the record garnering positive retrospective appraisals from the BBC,[9]Record Collector,[11]Pitchfork Media,[12]PopMatters[3] and The A.V. Club,[8] among others. Ned Raggett in AllMusic hailed it as "dazzling indeed",[7] and a "masterpiece"[16]—an opinion echoed by colleague David Jeffries.[17] In a positive review for PopMatters, John Bergstrom wrote: "Now, a quarter century later, both music and concept hold up as remarkably ahead of their time...Given the context of its original release, Dazzle Ships is quite possibly the most unique, unexpected, and uncommercial album ever to make the UK Top Five. If it overreaches the standard paradigm of pop music by a mile, its grasp covers almost all that ground. It remains an imperfect but stunning and, crucially, enthralling experience."[3]

Reflecting on the record in 2008, McCluskey said: "The album that almost completely killed our career seems to have become a work of dysfunctional genius...it's taken Paul [Humphreys] 25 years to forgive me for Dazzle Ships. But some people always hold it up as what we were all about, why they thought we were great."[5] That same year, John Bergstrom in PopMatters wrote: "It stands as one of the most unorthodox releases ever by a major pop artist...Today, Dazzle Ships is rightly considered a lost classic."[2] It was the focus of the August 2007 instalment of Mojo magazine's "Buried Treasure" feature, which spotlighted a "wrongly forgotten" record.[18]Dazzle Ships is positioned as one of the top 5 albums of 1983 at Sputnikmusic.[19] It was listed in Slicing Up Eyeballs' "Best of the '80s" in June 2013, being ranked as one of the top 25 releases of 1983 based on almost 32,000 reader votes.[20] The record has also been reintroduced to the public via album listings in publications like PopMatters,[2]The A.V. Club,[21] and Q magazine, who gave the album a favourable retrospective review in a feature entitled "10 Great Old-School Electronic Albums".[13] Although largely unknown to mainstream audiences, the record is regarded as a fan favourite among OMD listeners.[17]

Ian Wade in The Quietus described Dazzle Ships as "deeply influential." He reported that experimental rock band Radiohead were fans of the album;[22] several critics have observed the impact of the record on that group. Ned Raggett in AllMusic opined: "[Dazzle Ships is] a Kid A of its time that never received a comparative level of contemporary attention and appreciation. Indeed, Radiohead's own plunge into abstract electronics and meditations on biological and technological advances seems to be echoing the themes and construction of Dazzle Ships. What else can be said when hearing the album's lead single, the soaring 'Genetic Engineering', with its Speak & Spell toy vocals and an opening sequence that also sounds like the inspiration for 'Fitter Happier', for instance?"[7] In an article for Stylus, Thoem Weber argued that the Radiohead track is "deeply indebted" to "Genetic Engineering".[23] PopMatters journalist John Bergstrom observed: "As a Speak & Spell toy doles out lines like 'butcher engineer' in its synthesized voice [on 'Genetic Engineering'], you wonder if Radiohead heard the track before composing 'Fitter Happier'. The question answers itself in the form of 'ABC Auto Industry'...It's a direct predecessor of [Radiohead's] OK Computer." He continued the Radiohead comparison by asserting: "Referring to Dazzle Ships as OMD's Kid A is getting the right idea but ultimately sells the former album short."[3]

"[Dazzle Ships,] everyone points to as [OMD's] magnum opus. It's really a gorgeous album. It's daring and it's weird and it leans a lot on the paranoia of the Cold War."

Dazzle Ships has been championed by the likes of producer and musician Mark Ronson,[25]Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of indie pop group Saint Etienne,[26]Chris Walla of alternative rock band Death Cab for Cutie,[24] musician and public speaker Terre Thaemlitz,[27] and indie rock musician Telekinesis, who has declared the album as his all-time favourite.[28] Ronson said of the record: "I was just completely floored [by Dazzle Ships]. It's so weird when you hear something that's like 30 years old that immediately you're just like, 'I've been robbed, I could have been listening to this for the past 30 years'. It's just so elegant but a bit lo-fi at the same time. Bands...that took so long in the studio, just discovering the technology of those samplers and pitching and doing stuff with it, got it so right."[25]

The "Manor Version" of "Telegraph" was recorded at the same time as Architecture & Morality. "Swiss Radio International" was dropped from the album at the last minute. Like "Radio Prague", it contains the call sign for a radio station and was once referred to as "The Ice Cream Song" by drummer Mal Holmes due to its similarity to the melodies played by ice cream vans.